I started out knitting the body. The pattern is already written as a seamless, in the round, raglan, which is one of the things that attracted me in the first place.
I had worked my way through about 3/4 of the body when I discovered that my spit splices weren't holding that well. Yeah, I know that spit splicing is a bit of a cheat, but it means no ends to weave in. At this point I started knitting the sleeves from the body, unraveling as I went.
The pattern calls for you to knit a cuff in rib, joining the beginning and ending of the cuff, and then picking up stitches for the rest of the sleeve along one edge.
I did a provisional cast on and started ribbing. When I got to the end, I did a three-needle bind-off, picked up my stitches and started knitting on the sleeve. There was just one problem, I didn't like the silhouette.
The top piece is the sleeve according to the pattern. You can see way the seam splays out the knitting, and how there is a very distinct bump as you move into the decreases of the sleeve. The decreases are very close together (every other row), which just exacerbates the problem.
So, I decided to redesign the pattern. Using the long-tail method I cast on 106 stitches (the number of stitches that you pick up when you start knitting the main part of the sleeve). I purled one row, and then I placed a marker and joined the knitting. Continuing in the round I knit 2 rows, purled 2 rows until I had six purled ridges (not counting the cast on ridge). Then I continued in satin stitch. I also increased the number of rows between decreases, decreasing every 5 rows, starting at row 30 and continuing through row 100 (for 15 decreases or 30 stitches, 76 stitches remain).
The above image shows the resulting sleeve.
No comments:
Post a Comment